A quote in the souvenir program from the show's producers may reveal
the problem. Moya Doherty and John McColgan, who previously had a huge
hit with Riverdance, explain "We always wanted to produce a major
original musical theatre drama ... We wanted it to be Irish, have an epic
theme and a central character we and our audience could care about ... Many
great figures from Irish history were considered ... but in the end we settled
on ... Grace O'Malley." They go on to explain how their first and only choice
for writing the project was Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, who
brought a similar historical epic of Europe to the musical stage with
Les Misérables. The producers and writers surely had a good idea of what
The Pirate Queen would look like, and they've probably succeeded in
realizing that vision, but they've failed to put together a compelling
story or characters, or for that matter, a score worth listening to even
once.

According to biographer Anne Chambers, a consultant to The Pirate
Queen, Grace O'Malley was the daughter of a 16th century Irish
Chieftain, but precluded by law from becoming a Chieftain herself
following her father's death. Nonetheless, she became a successful
warrior, defender of Ireland and strong adversary to Queen Elizabeth I. "To
control her male, multi-tribal crews," Ms. Chambers writes, "to overcome
their prejudices and chauvinism, she had to lead from the front, be strong
and be successful." She sounds like an amazing person and I may read Ms.
Chambers' biography of O'Malley someday, because I sure didn't get much
about Grace from this show. It resembles a community or school pageant in
its two-dimensional depiction of characters and events. We must believe a
character is good or evil, because we are told so, not shown. It seems we
are expected to simply "know" that Grace is good, much as if she were
George Washington in an American elementary school play. Her lifelong
love of Tiernan is assumed, not revealed through detail. Elizabeth I's
henchman Lord Bingham is as evil and as subtly drawn as Snidely Whiplash
of the "Rocky and Bullwinkle" cartoons.

The Pirate Queen even fails to establish the sense of time and
place essential to an historical drama. We need to know more about the
social systems of Ireland, the nature of day-to-day living in that society,
and at least a little about the conflict with England.

The musical's thin plot is essentially this (skip if you're concerned
about spoilers, but beware that the producers felt compelled to give the
audience a synopsis to understand the story of this sung-through show): As
a young teen, Grace is in love with Tiernan. During a brutal storm, she
poses as a boy and climbs the rigging of her father's ship to cut its sail
and save the ship from disaster. Despite her demonstrated seaworthiness,
her father finds her more valuable as wife to the heir of a powerful clan.
For these political and military reasons, she is betrothed to the
unfaithful heir Donal and must part from Tiernan. (It takes 35 minutes to
get to this point, the first moment of any dramatic conflict in the
piece.) Donal is as worthless a warrior as a husband, so she "dismisses"
him something women or at least women of royalty were apparently
permitted to do up through the end of a marriage's trial period. Donal
then betrays her and she loses her lands to the English. Tiernan trades
his freedom for hers, which allows her to return to England and approach
the Queen. After a few hours of good old girl talk, the two women are
able to negotiate a truce and allow Grace and Tiernan to finally be
together.

This story is set to some of the most banal music imaginable, a score
that is way below the standards of Les Mis or even Miss
Saigon. It appears Schönberg has used music transcription software
for composition as well as transcription. It seems that every song uses a
short 2-bar motif that is altered ever so slightly maybe raised up a
third several times, and then strung into a song. The entire score,
except for the three major Irish dance numbers, is predictable. (There is
no separate credit listed for a dance composer, so presumably Schönberg
can take credit for it.) Most of it, save a few moments of comic relief
like "Boys'll Be Boys" the "Masters of the House"inspired number in
which Donal's infidelity is established, or the Gilbert & Sullivan
pastiche "Rah-Rah, Tip-Top" sung in the court of Elizabeth (did the
Brits been speak like that in the 16th century?), the music is all at the
same anguished level.

Boublil, who wrote the lyrics for Les Mis in French and had them
translated into English by Herbert Kretzmer, seems still not ready to be
writing verse in English, even with the assistance of the fine American
lyricist John Dempsey (The Witches of Eastwick, The Fix).
Like Boublil's lyrics for Miss Saigon (co-written with Richard
Maltby, Jr.), his verse here still favors short lines and monosyllabic
rhymes (like "me" and "be" ) with payoffs you can guess from five or six
beats away.

Director Frank Galati hasn't helped matters much either. Though he can
presumably be credited for hiring some truly exceptional performers and a
first-rate design team, he moves the cast around the stage in patterns
that are entirely uninspired. Most scenes end with a performer center
stage, left to make that long walk into the wings, while another character
or group dutifully enters from the opposite wings. Over 28 scenes, that
gets old.

Audiences will nonetheless find their rewards in The Pirate
Queen, chiefly the chance to discover leading man Hadley Fraser, learn
(if you didn't already know) that Stephanie J. Block is a leading lady of
the first caliber who deserves to originate a Broadway lead in a better
show than this, and confirm the considerable talents and charms of Jeff
McCarthy. Fraser, who plays Tiernan, is a heartthrob with a strong,
expressive tenor and a long string of credits in the UK, but apparently
working in the US for the first time. Ms. Block as Grace is a complete
winner feminine yet strong, soft yet athletic, and with a voice that
makes you think (briefly) there's more to the songs than is actually
there. She has future Tony winner written all over her. McCarthy and his
solid baritone give a strength and heart to Grace's father, Dubhdara.
Linda Balgord's operatic soprano serves her well as an icy Queen and
Marcus Chait makes a handsome and slimy Donal.

As the words and music don't do much to establish the setting, that job
falls entirely on the scenic design of Eugene Lee and lighting design of
Kenneth Posner, and they've come up with some stunning visuals. Lee's
backdrops along with blustery sound design by Jonathan Deans and
projections by Howard Werner conjure the windswept, wintry bluffs of
coastal Western Ireland. Lee's sets include pieces to suggest period
sailing ships, complete with climbable riggings for the aerial acrobatics
designed by Paul Rubin; medieval Irish castles; and Queen Elizabeth's
court. The 42-member cast is wardrobed sumptuously as peasants, sailors,
courtiers and a Queen by designer Martin Pakledinaz.

Most satisfying of The Pirate Queen's elements are the Irish
dance numbers, choreographed by Carol Leavy Joyce (Mark Dendy is credited
as the show choreographer). These dances, which occur during a wedding, a
funeral, and a christening - occasions that, according to the souvenir program,
would historically have been occasions for dance - are the only times this piece
really takes flight and suggests the sort of magic it might have had. The
orchestrations and musical direction by Julian Kelly make the dance music
especially gorgeous and authentic-sounding, though it's no fault of Kelly
(or for that matter of the Irish) that the mere entrance of uilleann pipes
and whistles provokes an expectation of Celine Dion singing "My Heart Will
Go On."

There's potential for a captivating musical in this subject matter, but
the writers didn't find the big ideas in terms of theme, plot and
character that would have made it an effective piece of theater. It could
have truly transported its audience to another era, but despite the best
efforts of the cast and a best-of-class production design team, The
Pirate Queen is only successful at taking the audience back to 1980s
New York and the sung-through European musicals of that time. At its
worst, The Pirate Queen unintentionally evokes the parody
opera within the musical of Lloyd Webber's Phantom. In making its
voyage to New York and Broadway, this ship may not be as lucky as the one
saved by young Grace O'Malley.